More than two years ago, the city of Dubuque and the Iowa DOT agreed on road swaps in relation to the Southwest Arterial. Six years after serious rumblings began about the city taking the project on for itself, we’re less than a year — but likely still a winter — away from completion.
Plans are to the point that the state submitted an application to the Route Numbering Committee (large PDF, Page 27) to reroute US 52 along IA 136 and US 20, its first relocation really visible on the map since, well, since the first time the state rerouted US 52 along IA 136 and US 20. There have been plenty of changes inside the city of Dubuque since that 1963-67 change, though. We’ll get our fifth wrong-way multiplex in the state. In this case, 52 will be reversed to make 52/61/151 north-south-south between the arterial and the Rockdale intersection, instead of all three going the same direction through the city.
With this change happening, I thought IA 136 would be pulled back from Luxemburg to Dyersville. I found out in the middle of May I was wrong. The DOT put out a sign letting for the entire route of IA 136 except for inside Clinton. It will involve replacing all the shields with the wide ones (cue loud heckling). I asked why shields would be replaced on the northernmost segment when they would be supplanted with US 52. The answer I got was that 136 would remain in place “to keep mailing addresses” because the highway number is its name in Dubuque County’s E911 system. (I didn’t ask a follow-up of, why not put that off a year so the signposts don’t have to be dealt with twice?)
So Iowa will get another redundancy in the state system, and my dream of breaking up IA 136, Iowa’s weirdest-shaped highway, into two separate routes (split at Wyoming) is crushed.
